Hi. Just looking for a basic walk-thru on proper setup of the SEO All-In-One sitemap. I have not configured it yet and need guidance on best practices before submitting to Google.

Does AIO offer this anywhere?

Many Thanks.

July 30, 20132:13 pm

Nina Gerrero

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Member Since: October 30, 2012

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Hi Ben,

We are in the middle of writing up documentation for the XML Sitemaps Module. Right now, leaving your settings at default is most likely best for your site. You can check the Notify Google and Notify Bing boxes to notify them of changes to your sitemap and, if you have not already done so, submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools with the instructions I’ve copied below.

1. On the Webmaster Tools Homepage, click the site you want.
2. Click the Sitemaps bar on the Site Dashboard
3. Click the red ADD/TEST SITEMAP button on the top, left side of that page.
4. Enter the URL for your sitemap.
5. Once the sitemap is successfully submitted, refresh the page.

Please let us know if you have any specific questions about the settings in the XML Sitemaps Module, we would be happy to give you some more information.

Thanks,

Nina

July 30, 20132:27 pm

Ben Smidt

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AIOSEOP

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Thanks for the response.
I would be very interested in the definitions of what and how ‘Priority’ and ‘Change Frequency’ are and how they affect my sitemap.
How do you change these? How are they initially set? What do they mean?

Just looking to do this right the first time.

July 30, 20133:17 pm

Nina Gerrero

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Hi Ben,

The Priority and Frequency are specific to each url in your sitemap. If you view your sitemap you can see the Priority and Change Frequency columns and what they are currently set at for each url. Values for both of these settings are generated based on the last modified date of the URL. So, something that changed yesterday would have a Frequency value of daily and the Priority value would most likely be around .9 (90%) depending on the rest of your site. The default settings for these in All in One SEO Pack are all Do Not Override, and if you have the Dynamically Generate Sitemap setting checked (which it is by default) than the Priorities and Frequencies on your sitemap will update as your site changes.

The Priority is the priority of the URL relative to the other URLs on your site. So, traditionally, the homepage has top priority for web crawlers and is therefore set to 100% with the percentage showing crawlers how important you feel a certain URL is. This setting is only used within your site so giving all your URLs a high priority won’t affect how your site ranks against other sites, it only tells crawlers how URLs relate on your own site.

The Frequency is how frequently a page is likely to change. This provides a guideline of your site to crawlers, but the settings chosen for this (hourly, daily, etc) are just suggestions to crawlers. They will take note of the setting and may follow it, but they can crawl at whatever frequency they want.